The voting for the tag telecom=*has started. Values can include exchange, service_device and connection_point. This should enable mappers to map last mile networks and related equipment like DSLAMs (Wikipedia link).

A user of StreetComplete spotted complicated opening hours that don’t fit within OSM’s limit of 255 chars. Whilst all agree that the issue is not limited to opening hours, opinions as to whether such a level of detail should be stored in one value differ.

User jeisenbe proposes a comprehensive handling of default language format for names and places within a region. The voting on the proposal is currently under way: you’re welcome to review it and express your vote.

Nicolas Chavent produced a Twitter moment on the two weeks of capacity building action OSM, OpenData and free geomatics in Port-au-Prince (Haiti) organized in coordination with members of the association Communauté OpenStreetMap Haiti Saint-Marc (C.OSMHA-STM) for people from academic, research, development sectors and the local OSM community, thanks to the support of the Economic and Digital Directorate of the International Organization of La Francophonie

The new value landuse=governmentalis proposed to mark land used by government bodies.

Community

On October 11 Nomad Maps finished his cartographic cycle tour through the Andes route having cycled 5000 kilometres. As a result more than 10,000 new objects were mapped and more than 100,000 additional photos added to Mapillary. He had 17 meetings with OpenStreetMap contributors in Colombia, Ecuador and Peru. As a cherry on the pie, Alban Vivert (@Nomadmapper) participated in SOTM Latam 2018 in Buenos Aires to present the results of the expedition and to meet other members of the OSM community. More info on Nomad’s blog and the website of Nomad Maps.

The “Schokofahrt” (chocolate tour) is a decentralized private bicycle tour for emission free transport of chocolate, to promote sustainable mobility and CO₂ neutral transport. At this year´s edition some stairs, that got in the way of the OSM based routing app BikeCitizens, were complicated to overcome with the heavily loaded cargo bikes. The map error was rapidly corrected.

Here are the videos for the State of the Map Latam 2018 sessions on September 24th in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

Sev OSM tweeted about two weeks of OSM and OpenData training in Conakry, Guinea.

Imports

Majka announced that an import of post boxes in Czech Republic is planned. The word import may be wrong here as it is mainly intended to update collection times and re-tag currently not active post boxes to disused:amenity=post_box.

Dannykath from Development Seed wrote about importing of data into OSM. The write-up covers topics like what type of data make sense to import, what is involved in the import process, what needs to be considered before starting, how to document and community involvement.

The Denver Regional Council of Governments is making a dataset available for importing to OpenStreetMap. It contains over 1 million building footprints, with an accuracy of 6 cm. Several import-a-thons will be organised for volunteers to review and ensure consistency with existing OSM data.

OpenStreetMap Foundation

Michael Reichert started a discussion on the OSMF list about the next Board elections: he suggested a slight change in the election calendar and a questionnaire for the candidates, instead of email flooding the mailing list. His proposal is getting positive feedback and further input on the subject.

Christine Karch from the SotM Working Group wrote a comprehensive summary (automatic translation) about her activity over the past year. The ‘Way to SotM 2018’ titled article covers the preparations of the SotM 2018 and other tasks related to her job at this Working Group. She details how she was working on the scholarship applications, the organisation and evaluation of the submitted abstracts for the SotM workshops, lightning talks, talks and other events, the work on the tender for the 2019 SotM and many related tasks. In addition she gave a lot of insight behind the scenes. She explained how helpful it was to meet Nicolas Chavent and Séverin Menard to find a better balance and give the French/African part of OSM some more room and also explained why she thinks that no Code of Conduct for OSM is required. Some minor, maybe more controversial points in the article are her feeling of an overweight of HOT in areas like scholarship and diversity.

User Stereo (Guillaume Rischard) wrote in his user diary about the new Organised Editing Guidelines that were drafted by the Data Working Group and are on the OSMF board meeting agenda of Oct 18th. In his post he explains the context and motivations but does not answer to solitary critic on the content of the new drafted guideline and lack of community involvement during the development.

Events

This year’s Chaos Communication Congress (Leipzig, 27th to 30th of December) will host once again an OpenStreetMap-Assembly. More details on this event on the dedicated wiki page (in German).

The Europe Direct Office in Cuneo (Piedmont, Italy) has organised (automatic translation) a full day around OSM, filled with talks, workshops and a mapping party. OSM will be presented by Marco Brancolini, OSM Piedmont coordinator for Wikimedia Italia; Alessandro Palmas, OSM Project Manager for Wikimedia Italia; and Cristiano Giovando, World Bank and HOT consultant.

A reminder that the upcoming FOSS4G event is on 25 October in Brussels. The planned schedule can be found here.

Humanitarian OSM

The 6th GeOnG forum will take place from October 29th to 31st in Chambéry, France. The GeOnG is organised by CartONG and includes topics like mapping and GIS, mobile data collection and many other technology related subjects that can be of interest in the humanitarian and development sector.

The English city St Albans is looking for crowdfunding to help visually impaired people with content for the app Soundscape. According to the article, the money will be used for a mapathon to train volunteers in OSM, verification and ongoing data maintenance.

Maps

The OSM-based London cycle parking map at stolenride.co.uk got an extra layer that can show the locations where bicycles were stolen based on police reports.

The New York Times used aerial images of the city Mexico Beach taken before and after Hurricane Michael and Microsoft’s building footprints to visualise the extent of the damage. The NYT identified 440 buildings of which 237 were destroyed and an additional 99 were severely damaged.

User SK53 wrote a blog post about how he created an OSM based raster map of the Irish Vice Counties with the proper Irish Grid, hill shading and hypsometric tints for use with MapMate, software intended to record, map, analyse and share biological sightings.

With Locator Map, you can now easily create locator maps in Data Wrapper. A location map is a simple map showing the position of a particular geographic area within its larger and presumably more familiar context. Locator Map is a new map editor to make this process as easy as creating bar charts. Try it here.

Software

Fabian Kowatsch introduces a new ohsome dashboard prototype as a preview on what is possible with the HeiGIT’s ohsome OpenStreetMap history analytics platform which is deployed on a distributed cloud system using Apache Ignite. You can explore the evolution of any available OSM tag over time in arbitrary areas of Germany and calculate some summary statistics.

Programming

In a blog post Alex-7 pointed to a prototype of an OSM map that generates Open Location Codes (OLC) for every position and, vice versa. One can also lookup a position based on the Open Location Code. It works without the need to add OLC related data to OSM.

ENT8R has added the filter parameters user name, user ID and time to the search functions of the OSM-API for Notes and documented the new functions in the OSM wiki.

Trafford Data Lab developed and documented a new Plugin for the Leaflet JavaScript library to show areas of reachability based on time or distance for different modes of travel using the Openrouteservice isochrones API. Included are various examples to get you started.

Did you know …

… Pascal Neis’ tool that generates a list of suspicious changesets based on different adjustable criteria? The results are also available as an RSS feed.

… the OSM changeset analyser OSMCha? It allows you to keep track of edits in changesets. Many different filters can be used when visualising changes in changesets.

… that you can invoke a username based filter with user:username when using overpass-turbo.eu?

… the OSM and NASA based map that simulates rising sea levels following a temperature increase. It allows you to simulate global warming caused land loss.

Other “geo” things

Benjamin Schmidt wrote the article Data-driven projections: Darwin’s world that shows the world map in a projection that centres around Charles Darwin’s route with his ship Beagle. The result is an interesting, but very unfamiliar perspective of the globe, with North America and Eurasia looking unimportant at the edge of the map.

The Relevator published an article showing the estimated regional change in rainfall and snow until 2050 caused by the climate change. The predicted change is displayed on an interactive map on a county level.

Microsoft has made a strategic investment in ride-hailing and on-demand services company Grab as part of a deal that includes collaborating on big data and AI projects.

[1] Neil Kaye published an animated gif on Twitter and Reddit that demonstrates the size of a country as shown in a Mercator projection compared to its true dimension.

A reader of Macrumors took photos of a man wearing a rucksack full of measurement devices walking along a street in San Francisco. The devices were LIDAR, GNSS and cameras for Apple Maps. Cars are also used for this purpose. In June 2018 Apple announced that they will not use third-party data in future anymore (we reported).

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weeklyOSM updates the community, on a weekly basis, about what is going on in the OSM Universe. weeklyOSM is intended for everyone, from experienced mappers to new OSM members. It is created by mappers and OSM enthusiasts. Contributors to weeklyOSM in all languages are always welcome. Due to the enormous workload (52 issues per year, no vacations, no holidays) new languages can only be set up if three mappers agree to cooperate.

The idea of weeklyOSM is to collect relevant OSM news from all over the world, process it and translate it into as many languages as possible. This should help to inform the community as comprehensively as possible and overcome language barriers.

weeklyOSM is independent of all organisations and companies. This applies to OSMF, HOT, FOSSGIS … and all other companies not listed here. Nevertheless, we would be happy if our current issue (in whatever language) would appear on the start page of the Wiki on an equal footing with “Use OpenStreetMap”, “Contribute free map data” and “Software Development”. We would also like to point out that the editorial staff are not subject to OSMF supervision.